Early Childcare and Child Development

1. Early Childcare and Child Development Kirstine Hansen and Denise Hawkes Centre for Longitudinal Studies Institute of Education University of London k.hansen@ioe.ac.uk e

2. Background • Nowadays many more children experience non-maternal childcare when they are young than in the past. • The effect this may have on their cognitive and behavioural development is unclear. • This paper uses data from the UK for a sample of children in the Millennium Cohort Study to test how different forms of childcare at an early age play a role in the production of cognitive skills and the behavioural development of young children.

3. Literature • There is no consensus in the empirical literature, but as data improve and the range of empirical evidence grows, findings suggest that how children suffer (or benefit) from non-maternal care depends on the quality of alternative care being provided. • Characteristics of childcare quality commonly found to be positively associated with child cognitive outcomes include: • The qualifications of care providers; • stability of staff; • structure and content of daily activities; • the space and facilities used to provide the care. • This means that, where quality of care is not directly observed, formal care settings (nurseries, crèches, child-minders, nannies and au-pairs) with qualified staff and a structured curriculum provided in specially equipped facilities are, on average, more likely to be associated with the positive cognitive development of a child than less formal childcare settings (care provided by relatives, friends and neighbours).

4. The relationship between quality of childcare and behavioural development seems to be less clear. • What appears to matter more for behavioural outcomes is the type of care. • Evidence from the US show that children who experience non-relative care, and in particular formal group care, are more likely to show behavioural problems than children using other types of childcare (Belsky et al. 2007) • While there is less evidence from the UK, the evidence there is does not concur with the US findings. • Results from the Effective Provision of Pre-School Education Project (EPPE) show that children who attend pre-school have a better start at school in terms of behavioural development than children who don’t experience pre-school. • The authors argue that pre-school helps to develop the social skills required for a good start at school. The effects of pre-school are most advantageous for those from disadvantaged background (Sammons et al. 2002).

5. Data: Millennium Cohort Study. • Longitudinal Survey of around 19,000 children born in the UK over a twelve month period and living in selected UK wards at age 9 months. • The first survey took when the children were around 9 months old. • This provides the information on early childcare use. • The second survey took place when the children were around 3 years of age. • Child outcomes are measured at age 3.

6. Early Childcare Data • Measured at 9 months. • We want to emphasise early childcare use because: • much of the debate has been about the effect of removing children from their mothers at an early age; • UK policy is increasingly emphasising the need to provide structured early education from birth (see the Childcare Act 2006) • because childcare is observed before the outcomes are measured this provides a more exogenous childcare variable. • Care is broken down into the following groups: • Formal group care: Nursery and creche. • Formal non-group care: childminder, nanny/au pair. • Grandparent care: Any grandparent care – mostly done by the maternal grandmother. • Partner care – father or partner of mother. • Other informal care: Other relatives, friends, neighbours.

7. Childcare use by working mothers when the children are aged 9 months

8. Child Outcome Measures • British Ability Scale (BAS) • Naming vocabulary test • Bracken School Readiness • Colours, numbers, letters, sizes, shapes. • Behaviour SDQ • consists of 25 items generating an overall score as well as scores for five subscales measuring: conduct problems; hyperactivity; emotional symptoms; peer problems; and pro-social behaviour. The items are assessed via parental report, normally by the mother.

9. Mean child outcomes at age 3

10. Vocabulary

11. School Readiness

12. Behaviour

13. Results - Vocabulary • Vocabulary score grandparent care is positively associated with outcomes. • This makes sense because grandparents may not be able to provide the academic facilities or stimuli that formal care providers can but they are likely to talk and interact with children more frequently and on a one-to-one basis. However, it is not the nature of the one-to-one care which solely produces the positive relationship. The relationship does not exist for children using other non-group settings. It is specific to grandparent care. • Possible explanations include the fact that grandparents may talk to children more than other carers, not only because they have more time, but because they compensate for a reduction in physical activities with the child (Tamis et al. 2004). • There is also evidence that suggests that older people, adjusting for qualifications, tend to use grammatically correct sentences and speak more slowly to children (Griffin and Spieler 2006). • Moreover, older people do not easily tolerate grammatical errors and they resort more than younger people to corrective input when interacting with children which helps develop language (Strapp 1999). • In a sense grandparent care is producing both a quality (of language production) and quantity effect.

14. Results – School Readiness • School Readiness: • Formal group care is associated with better cognitive scores than other types of care. • Possible reasons for this include: formal group care is more likely to offer structure and content of daily activities, formal carers are more likely to be trained, more likely to have better facilities and resources and access to more educational stimulation. • Formal non-group care is worse than formal group care but better than the informal types of care for school readiness. All types of informal care are negatively associated with Bracken School Readiness Scores compared to formal care. • Behavioural scores: • Children using grandparent and partner care have higher behavioural scores (indicating more problem behaviour) than children using other forms of childcare. • If we look within the categories of the behavioural measurement - the result is largely driven by these children scoring poorly on the peer relation scale. • This may be because the children cared for by grandparents and partners have less contact with other children outside of the family and are probably being cared for alone.

15. Subgroup analysis • The analysis so far has considered children attending each childcare setting as a homogenous group. • However, in reality children within each care setting will vary considerably. • For this reason we consider whether childcare is related to child outcomes differentially across different groups of children. • To test this the full specification model was applied separately to different groups of children: girls compared to boys; those with low educated mothers (who left school at the compulsory school leaving age) compared to high educated mothers (those with post-compulsory schooling); those in lone parent families compared to two parent families; those with young mothers (aged under 20) compared to older mothers (aged 21 plus); and children in households claiming benefits compared to households not claiming benefits.

16. Regression of childcare on BAS, Bracken and SDQ scores for different sub-groups

17. Summary 1 • The results suggest that formal group childcare in the first 9 months of life is positively associated with the Bracken School Readiness Scores at 3 years old whilst grandparent care in the first 9 months of life is positively associated with the BAS vocabulary test scores at 3 years old. • The results for the SDQ behavioural scores show that grandparent and partner care are positively associated with behavioural problems as identified by mothers. • The results indicate that childcare covers a variety of different types of care arrangements which are likely to vary in the degree to which they educate and / or care for the child. Different types of care are likely to provide different experiences for the child, and as a result, the various care arrangements examined here, are differentially related to the three child outcomes measured in this paper.

18. Summary 2 • The results also show that different relationships between childcare and child outcomes exist for different groups of children. • Grandparent care was shown only to be positively, and statistically significantly, associated with the vocabulary scores for the more advantaged groups: This may reflect the better vocabulary skills of grandmothers in these types of families. • The association between formal group care and school readiness, on the other hand, is completely different. • On the whole, the association between school readiness and formal group care is larger for the more disadvantaged groups. • The association for the SDQ behavioural score suggests that the relationship between grandparent care and behavioural problems is stronger for the less advantaged children.

19. Summary 3 • However, we need to be slightly cautious when interpreting these findings as, although we measure childcare and all other control variables at age 9 months (t-1) and child outcomes at age 3 (t), we can not be sure we are measuring any causal relationship. • Moreover, we would ideally like to be able to elaborate on what it is about the different forms of childcare that are differentially associated with the child outcomes. • For this we would need information on how the children are cared for in different settings, which do not exist in the data. • Future research - see whether the findings presented persist as the children get older and gain experience of other forms and durations of childcare and begin school. This research will be possible with future sweeps of MCS data.